Berger then said that he tests his incoming students each year in a similar way. He has them listen to a variety of recordings which use different formats from MP3 to ones of much higher quality. He described the results with some disappointment and frustration, as a music lover might, that each year the preference for music in MP3 format rises. In other words, students prefer the quality of that kind of sound over the sound of music of much higher quality. He said that they seemed to prefer “sizzle sounds” that MP3s bring to music. It is a sound they are familiar with.

That “sizzling” has always driven me nuts in the lower quality stuff.

I remember wondering what audiophiles were up to, buying extremely expensive home audio systems to play old vinyl records. They put turntables in sand-filled enclosures with elaborate cabling schemes. I wondered what they heard in that music that I didn’t. Someone explained to me that audiophiles liked the sound artifacts of vinyl records — the crackles of that format. It was familiar and comfortable to them, and maybe those affects became a fetish. Is it now becoming the same with iPod lovers?

I can’t totally subscribe to this hypothesis. Because vinyl records are analog, they play a continuous audio wave that includes a bit of warm fuzz and crackle. Whereas digital audio is a mashup of samples from the audio wave; the sizzle and hiss created from the gaps between the samples. You may get a little noise with vinyl, but at least cymbals will sound like they do in real life.